It’s a western with the charm of a rattlesnake. It comes with
castanets attached to its tail, clickety-clicking
through its early storybuilding as if to mesmerise
us with rhythm, repetitions and the ambient noise of desert life. Then, when
it chooses, it strikes: once, twice, thrice. How many funerals does it take
to make a western? As many as time allows and as drama dictates.

Then again, is Tommy Lee Jones’s THE THREE BURIALS OF
MELQUIADES ESTRADA a western?It
certainly has a western’s primal scenery and fabular
storytelling. It certainly has, by the time it’s through, its raw moral
callisthenics. And it sure as hell won two top prizes – for Best Actor
(Jones) and Best Screenwriter (Guillermo Arriaga) –
for a movie that Cannes audiences lapped up as the perfect end-of-term treat
at a festival where novelty and tradition had been in close embrace
throughout. (Veteran thesps Jessica Lange, Sharon
Stone and Bill Murray working for the eternally self-renewing Jim Jarmusch in BROKEN FLOWERS. WimWenders and Sam Shepard wrestling new life into old
formulae with their PARIS, TEXAS knockoff DON’T COME KNOCKING).

Jones’s film rediscovers the western by not appearing to be a western
at all. At least for the first half hour. It just shambles into being like an
open-range soap opera. Only later does it expand into something like a true
opera, a verismo morality epic scored for full
scenic orchestra, as themes of love, atonement, punishment and redemption
echo across the deserts, canyons and badlands.

At first it could almost be a John Sayles film: one without the sound
of political agendas being sharpened but with the manky
variety of character and sly quickening of subplots. The newly-arrived young
border guard (Barry Pepper) and his wife, moving into their jerry-built dream
home on the edge of nightmare. (He: “I’ll get you a Nintendo in case you get
bored”). The sheriff who puts his paws all over the diner-owner’s wife and
talks filthy down the phone the way she likes it (“It’s been a while since we
spent some time together – you dirty bitch”). The aging cowpoke with the
leathered face and snap-brim drawl, played by the man with the name above the
title, whose best mate is the man with his name in the title. Tommy
Lee Jones is Pete Perkins. Julio Cesar Cedillo is Melquiades Estrada, Tex-Mex homeboy whose home is the
open land and open sky, but who is felled by the bullet from trigger-ready
border cop Pepper, who uses unnecessary force when spooked by rabbit-hunting
gunfire while spanking his, ahem, monkey. (Message to all law enforcers: do
not read girlie mags while on duty).

The first hasty burial is, in twin senses, a cover-up. Get the man in
the ground; shovel the falsehoods over the truth. It’s easy to lie, again in
more than one sense. A slain man knows the supine innocence of death. A false
man is fluent in resourceful perfidy. Soon everyone necessary is in on it,
including the chief border cop, bending the arm and ear of the servile
sheriff. Only Jones’s cowpoke, serving out his last active years in the
arduous labour of doing nothing much on horseback, recognizes a moral
imperative when it smacks him from a clear sky.

It’s here the movie starts to vein and wrinkle so wondrously. It seems
to grow as old, yet as sinewy-tough, as Jones himself, whose phiz and physique were designed by nature to blend with sandblown deserts, corrugated canyons and maverick moral
workouts. The existential exercise Jones never got in his last western-style
outing, Ron Howard’s THE MISSING (with its oddly similar trek-and-retribution
plot), is all here for him as Arriaga’s story makes
picaresque companions of the hero and the killer cop he captures, plus the
twice-exhumed corpse of the slain friend, and follows the trio on their
redemptive horseback slog to Mexico. The destination? Estrada’s last and
future resting-place in the verdant valley of his memory (a village name, a
keepsake photo) – if such a place exists out there beyond the reach of the
sure and familiar, beyond the bounds of what is drolly called, for some,
civilisation.

But exactly what ‘civilised’ means may be the core of the movie. Does
it mean the lives of vegetative whitefolk watching
TV soaps in their dead-end bars and trailers, or screwing each other’s wives
or husbands, or drinking themselves into nirvanas of indifference, on that Maginot line of defiance where they try to push back
intruders into the American dream? Does it mean creating inanition and calling
it peace? Creating a siege society and calling it home?

Or is civilisation to be found in the honours lovingly strewn on a
dead friend by a living one, even if that means half-killing his killer
(dragging him through a gauntlet of suffering, sickness and snakebites after
leaving Pepper’sbound-and-gagged wife
at home watching the Weather Channel) while libating
the accompanying corpse with what gifts of life and preservation remain to
hand. When Estrada’s face is swarmed over by ants, the hero burns them off.
When Estrada’s hair gets untidy, he drunkenly puts a comb through it. When
Estrada starts to stink too much, the body is filled up with anti-freeze. The
man providing this deodorant is a border country shack-dweller so lonely that
he asks Jones and Pepper to shoot him. (They don’t, though their faces
reflect a shocked and sheepish empathy).

No American movie since Peckinpah has so
dared to cross the border into a gonzo tragic absurdism.
Even BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA stopped short of suggesting, as Arriaga’s script does, that life across the Rio Grande might be just as stunted as life on this side. Over in Mexico they are watching the same TV soaps. The only difference is, they do
it outside on cantina verandas or sitting by broken-down trucks at the
roadside. While foreigners swarm into America for a piece of paradise, ‘paradise’ sneaks over the border with
previews of coming attractions.

Goodness happens inside individuals. It has long escaped the
dispensation of governments, cultures or societies: they just descend to the
commonest low denominators. Only the individual and the love between
individuals – however much it is multiplied, so long as it is not socialised
or systematised – preserves those verdant valleys where hope, faith and honour
survive forever. By the end of THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA even
Jones and Pepper have become friends of sorts. In a sly and cheeky parody of
Abolition, the hero gives his captive his freedom and the captive discovers
that bondage, for all its faults, at least defined the worth of liberty, in
the same way that a just punishment can define the nature and take the
measure of a crime.

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.